Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

The Alpha Marketer

Last post we talked about the power of business blogging and used a case study of Dolly magazine's Bronwyn McCahon. This post let's look at some to the ways that Dolly markets to their target audience of 14-to-17-year-old readers.

The major thing to consider when marketing to teens is that they use just about every gadget introduced out there to communicate with. As a result marketing has to be cross-platform rather than to only one channel.

McCahon mentions that Short Message Service (SMS) a service available on most digital mobile phones and the Internet are the key to marketing to her customers. This works so good because of the online community that has been built around the Dolly brand.

She says:

"With a teen market, there is so much competition for their time and money that it makes sense to access them at every point. A sponsor event might be in the magazine, on the website and the blog and in an SMS update so advertisers get a complete package. They'll see straight through a straight sell, but if there's something in it for them like a discount on underwear, the readers say, 'Cool, Bron, thanks'."

"This generation will text their friends or (send a) picture message about their purchase," McCahon says. "The power of SMS is incredible."

All of this is transferring what teens like to do in the real world. They want a place to hang out, keep in contact with friends and share the "cool" stuff they find.

The main point in marketing to them, once you've found what they like, is to offer what you have across all their communcation devices and points of contact.

You have to do this whether you're marketing for your own company or offering advertising for other brands. The demand in marketing to teens is to offer cross-platform strategies. It's the only way to get your message to them effectively.